Re: [Best Practices] splitting and combining choral parts

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi Simon,

> I’d vote to keep with four staves, at least in this example.

For the record, I sometimes do that. One good example is “Go Thy Way”, a score 
of which you can see at 
<http://kierenmacmillan.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/GoThyWay_octavo_20151111.pdf?f8f128>.

But that’s a short a cappella piece, with just enough polyphonic differences 
(homophonic offsets, mostly) that it never makes sense to be in two staves for 
very long. “Wither’s Carol” is longer and more complex; it has instrumental 
parts (and/or a piano reduction); it alternates between a cappella, 
instrumental, and combined-forces sections, etc. Ultimately, sticking to four 
chorus staves doesn’t make much sense [in all score outputs], in my opinion.

By the way: the “Go Thy Way” score is “almost final”. That will give you a 
sense of the amount of stylesheeting and edition-engraver tweaking I do to my 
scores, to overcome Lilypond’s shortcomings (e.g., the BarNumber padding bug 
you saw in the “minimal” example I supplied for this thread).

I would do even more, but there’s a point of diminishing marginal utility: at 
some point, I’d rather compose a new piece than sit and tweak the engraving of 
an old one.  ;)

Thanks,
Kieren.
________________________________

Kieren MacMillan, composer
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: address@hidden